William Hogarth: The Strodes Family

The Idea of the Home

During holiday times, such as the winter season of festivities that many of us are enjoying right now, a substantial number of people travel sometimes large distances to re-connect and celebrate with other relatives back at their families’ homes. This led to my reflecting not so much about the reality of the home, as the idea of the home. The conception of the home, or “hominess,” evolved over a period of many centuries. By the early 1500s, domestic life was rather austere, but had come to reflect a sense of intimacy and privacy. On the other hand, if we were to have asked any of them if they felt comfortable where they lived, they would have been puzzled by the question and unable to answer. The first appearance of the word “comfort” to mean a level of domestic contentment is not reported until the eighteenth century.

One illustration of this new found sense of domestic comfort is shown above in William Hogarth’s painting of an early Georgian interior. Notice how the softened furniture complemented the rich costumes of the time and served as counterparts to the billowing gowns worn by women, as well as to the finely embroidered coats and wigs of the men.

The slightly pompous interiors also reflected the clothing fashions of the time. Skirted chairs and gathered draperies reflected the details of how cloth had come to be used in skirts and gowns; wallpaper often copied the designs used in fabrics. The lavish Art Deco furniture reflected the homeowners’ own luxurious garments.

My personal thought for each of you who has been able to spend time re-connecting with loved ones is to always remember that home is where all of us started from. I very deeply hope that going back provided you with strong feelings of warmth and deep affection.

The article presents some reflections on hope. It discusses how the attempt to specify the meaning of hope is complicated by the need to clarify the many relationships between hope and expectations. And yet, we must dare to hope. It is accompanied by pictures (incorporates Picasso’s Peace Dove) and two videos (including Josh Groban’s You Raise Me Up).

Reflections on Hope

As the New Year approaches, my thoughts have turned to the idea of hope. With some irony, I recalled how modern popular culture has incorrectly come to reify the ideas of the “ego,” the “self” and “identity,” mistakenly thinking of them as real, concrete objects. Further, I considered that we may well have deceptively done the same thing with the idea of hope. The following considerations may serve to illustrate some, though certainly not all, of the complications attending the idea of “hope.” For example, the meaning of hope is not exhausted by the distinction between hope as a conscious quality of emotion that is associated with our actions (realistic hope) and magical hope. In addition, there are all kinds of mixtures between realistic hope and magical hope.

Hope cannot be fully described and its role in the individual not fully understood without at the time describing its relation to acceptance (of reality, of the world, of one’s own situation, of others). The strength (or depletion) of the influence of hope cannot be fully described without at the same time accounting for the presence or absence, and quality, of disappointment during times of frustrated hope. It can be claimed that hope is always hope for improvement of one’s own, someone else’s or mankind’s condition. From this perspective, it becomes particularly vital as an emotional influence that can provide nourishment to the pursuit of our goals. However, the more certain one needs to be that hope will not be disappointed, the more one is functioning in the realm of the idea of hope in which there is reward for effort, and one begins to engage in (either less or more extreme) magical hope.

At the extreme point of magical hope are those reformers, revolutionaries and prophets who are convinced that ultimately they will succeed, that their paths alone are the right ones and that only those paths can lead to ultimate salvation. A polar position is pessimism, a view that nothing can be done to relieve man’s painful state in this world. Even the position of pessimism can take different forms. For example, ideological and contemporary political conservatives feed the masses a magical, fantastic sense of hope, in which they themselves do not actually believe. Another, surely more preferable form of pessimism, is perhaps best represented by Camus’ Sisyphus. In this case, the fact is accepted that we cannot know and yet we still have to make the effort. This is acceptance of reality, of man’s finite situation, without abandoning effort despite being unable to rely upon hope as a resource. It is a position where the effort is still maintained, but because we want to make it, even if it will turn out to have been in vain. This is very difficult and courageous, because it calls for giving up all hope for reward.

Finally, to complicate matters further in trying to clearly specify the meaning of hope, the issue of degree of certainty inevitably becomes involved. For example, if I could not expect with some degree of certainty that by taking the subway or bus I will arrive at a certain chosen destination (or goal), I well might give up the effort altogether. In others words, the attempt to specify the meaning of hope is even further complicated by the need to clarify the many relationships between hope and expectations.

It’s the Good Humor Guy!!

Type “college prank” into YouTube and you’ll be greeted with hundreds of videos. Most will be really, really dumb. Many won’t even be pranks at all. Some of them will make you furrow your brow, shake your head, and fear for the future of our country. But a few of them push the art of the prank to new heights. Being able to share videos online has encouraged the best college pranksters to make their stunts more elaborate. It also allows us to share in their glorious humorous insanity.

Living Painfully Lonely Lives

Solitude and Isolation

In the 2000 film Cast Away, Tom Hanks plays an obsessive, clock-watching businessman, Chuck Noland, who by an unexpected misfortune finds himself stranded on an isolated Pacific island. Noland copes with his four years of social disconnection and loneliness in part by befriending a volleyball, which he names Wilson. He jokes with Wilson and confides in Wilson and mistreats Wilson, and at one point he even kicks his companion out of their cave like an angry spouse. When he finally and irretrievably loses his volleyball to the ocean currents, he cries, “I’m sorry, Wilson!“

Many of us might have had daydreams of fantasys about living alone, far from the commotion and pressure of modern life. But we should watch what we wish for, because in fact most of us would not fare well in such isolated conditions. This has been shown time and again: people who live lonely and disconnected lives, even smack in the middle of a modern metropolis, are more depressed, more suicidal and have more physical illnesses than the rest of us. Such longing is especially poignant at holiday time. The lonely are in effect emotional throwaways.

And how do emotional castaways cope? What cognitive tools do we have to salve the pain of loneliness? We might well do precisely what Chuck Noland knew intuitively to do. We “invent” people to keep us company, humanizing anything we can humanize, pets, supernatural beings, possibly even something as unlikely as avolleyball.

There is a more unsettling possibility, as well. If the human mind is wired to make lonely people hunger for connection, as these studies show, then the inverse is probably also true. That is, people who are not lonely, who are secure in their circle of friends and family, may be more likely to dehumanize strangers; they have no motivation to make further connections. So perhaps it’s not entirely fanciful for an emotional castaway to befriend a volleyball, but for most of us the greater risk may be treating real flesh-and-blood humans as playthings.

Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, and John T. Cacioppo at The University of Chicago have conducted interesting empirical research about loneliness, which you can read here: Link.